Laughter as language

Abstract

Understanding the import of laughter, has interested philosophers and literary scholars for millennia and, more recently, psychologists, biologists, neuroscientists, and linguists. However, the assumption has been that laughter lacks meaning akin to what words and phrases possess and that it does not contribute to the compositional construction of meaning. In this paper, we argue that, in fact, laughter (and other non-verbal social signals like smiling, sighing, frowning) has propositional content-it involves reference to external real world events, has stand alone meanings, and participates in semantic and pragmatic processes like repair, implicature, and irony. We show how to develop a formal semantic and pragmatic account of laughter embedded in a general theory of conversational interaction and emotional reasoning and show how to explain the wide, indeed in principle unbounded range of uses laughter exhibits. We show how our account can be extended to other non-verbal social signals like smiling, sighing, eye rolling, and frowning. Should laughter and its ilk be incorporated in the grammar? We suggest that they probably should be, if one assumes a conversationally-oriented view of grammar. But various open issues remain.

Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed, Something Taboo: Interaction and Creativity in Humour

“…A natural progression of this work is to account for humour in a more precise way, following the work of Breitholtz and Maraev (2019) who use Type Theory with Records (Cooper, 2005) to provide a formal representation of how a particular joke plays out. A general formal model of humorous interaction could, among other things, provide a more precise definition of incongruity in humour, taking inspiration from incongruity related to laughter as discussed in Ginzburg et al (2015Ginzburg et al ( , 2020. Such a model could be tested and evaluated and potentially also feed into research on artificial intelligence (AI) allowing conversational AI to understand and generate creatively humorous contributions (Maraev et al, 2020).…”

“…The key assumption is that most jokes require a resolution step, accounting for the decrease in oddity of the situation as a joke unfolds. However, although the notion of incongruity has been discussed for many years, it hasn't been precisely defined (though see Mazzocconi, 2019;Ginzburg et al, 2020, for recent attempts to do so), and many scholars claim that other key concepts in incongruity-resolution theories also lack precise definitions (Ritchie, 2004;Morreall, 2011;Warren and McGraw, 2016). In this work we do not aim at precisely defining incongruity, although we believe that the elements in our account can be used as the building blocks for defining (and therefore calculating) incongruity.…”

Influencing laughter with AI-mediated communication

“…Given these complex communicative and intentional functions of laughter and other nonverbal behaviours which interact with verbal phenomena, some linguists argue that laughter, like verbal/written language, conveys its own propositional content that interacts with verbally conveyed propositional content (Plessner, 1970;Ginzburg et al, 2015Ginzburg et al, , 2020Tian et al, 2016;Eshghi et al, 2019). In these theories, far from being an automatic response of emotional contagion, the interpretation of laughter by the audience involves highly complex reasoning processes requiring contextual inferences about attentional, emotional, and intentional internal states (Reddy, Williams, & Vaughan, 2002;Ginzburg et al, 2015Ginzburg et al, , 2020Mazzocconi, 2019). This is because the propositional content of laughter and the speech act it performs are highly underspecified and context-dependent.…”

Saying and shaking ˋNo'

“…The basic treatment we have sketched here for head shaking applies to laughter, smiling, and related facial gestures. Ginzburg et al (2020) argue that laughter and smiling have two basic meanings, one that expresses the incongruity of an event, the other that an event is pleasant for the speaker. From the noetic head shakes we can make the prediction that laughter will only co-occur with positive head shakea testable prediction of the account of negation in discourse presented here.…”

“…The current question under discussion is tracked in the qud field, whose data type is a partially ordered set (poset). Mood tracks public displays of emotion, crucial for inter alia laughter and smiling (Ginzburg et al, 2020). Mood will be needed in order to model noetic negation.…”